I will be out of town next weekend, and probably not able to upload something the weekend after that, so I find it unlikely that you’ll get Saturday Notes these next two weeks? I’m not sure. I’ll try to make it up somehow.
When you read this, I am probably reading The Star Wars Archives by Paul Duncan, though I may have moved to something else! I’m struggling to write; not because I don’t have ideas, but because I don’t know how to start the darn thing and it’s bothering me. Maybe I’m missing a writers’ workshop?
The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe is celebrating 75 years, by the way.
The Saturday Note will start a bit political, but we’ll move away from it as we go on, so stick with me.
Misunderstanding The Lord of the Rings
Some digital ink has been spilled recently because Elon Musk tweeted about how the “hard men of Gondor” in Lord of the Rings are the ones who protect the peaceful folk of the Shire, and how society needs “hard men”--don’t look at me, that’s his phrasing–and by that he means right wing people who are willing to openly say they hate foreigners. To him, and other right-wing nutjobs, Lord of the Rings is a story about how the civilized West is threatened by the Barbaric East and must fight against it to preserve their way of life.
Now you may be thinking, “Wow! That’s stupid!”, and you’d be right. One with any sort of knowledge of J.R.R. Tolkien’s views could easily conclude that he, a nature-loving language scholar that loved the simple life and despised the Industrial Revolution, would look at the richest man on Earth, a rabid industrialist (and arguably a mass murderer) the same way you might look at a cockroach stuck to the gum stuck on your shoe. But it’s also not entirely surprising because people have been getting this book wrong for ages.
What we must understand is that Tolkien’s influence on the fantasy genre simply cannot be understated. The late, great Sir Terry Pratchett once said:
“J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.”
With the success of Lord of the Rings, a lot of people tried to imitate him. The idea of a fantasy world inhabited by dwarves, elves, orcs, and a Dark Lord? Tolkien didn’t invent these things, but his success at using them meant a lot of other people wanted to try using them in their own fantasy stories. But what a lot of writers and fans miss are the details that make Lord of the Rings distinct, and its themes in building its narrative. This exploded with the movies, which were quite good, but so many viewers were entranced by the battles they didn’t notice that those fight scenes aren’t there for the sake of it.
[It doesn’t help that you have bad faith interpretations of people asking stupid questions like, “What was Aragorn’s tax policy?” but I covered that already.]
So to audience members who only remember awesome battle sequences with swords and orcs and such, they think, “Ah! This is what fantasy is about!” And they build on that, trying to make fantasy battles that are constantly getting BIGGER and MOAR EPIC, which often means that characters are growing more powerful in order to defeat insanely strong villains. Of course, they’re forgetting that in Lord of the Rings, the good guys explicitly aren’t more powerful than the forces of Sauron. The way the good guys win is by taking the ultimate weapon and destroying it, because even if they could control it, that much power would corrupt them. The most explicitly powerful character among the Fellowship is Gandalf, and he purposefully does not use most of that power in flashy or notable ways–when he does pull out big magical techniques, it’s to defend, not to attack, like when he blocks the Witch-King from entering Minas Tirith.
For Tolkien, you are not to use power to crush your enemies–that path only leads to corruption. You see it again and again in his Legendarium, though in Lord of the Rings it’s notable with Saruman: a wizard who grasps at power he only barely understands, thinking that because he is clever at some things, he must be cleverer than everyone else on the map, which leads to horrible miscalculations on his part (and ends with him having a most undignified death).
It is the villains who prize gaining power, and it costs them. The entire gambit of destroying the One Ring is built on the notion that Sauron would never in a million years guess that the Good Guys would be dumb enough to try to destroy the ultimate weapon–and he doesn’t, not until Frodo puts on the One Ring in Mount Doom, leading to a truly massive “OH S***!” on his part.
I also think that a lot of writers don’t understand Tolkien’s worldbuilding; they think elves are just, “Magic guys with pointy ears,” and that’s… not really what Tolkien was going for. It’s even debated if Tolkien pictured his elves as having pointed ears. It’s frustrating to me that so much dark fantasy these days treats elves as an ethnic group discriminated against instead of anything mystical–though at least in cases like Dragon Age and The Witcher, they clearly used to be a powerful magical race, and we’re seeing their status as a fallen or conquered civilization past their prime.
Generally, writers try to play this as a deconstruction of some sort, like, “Tolkien made his elves perfect, but in MY story, they’re poor/discriminated against/evil/racists–” or whatever. But this misunderstands that the elves in the Legendarium aren’t perfect. They screwed up a lot of times in the backstory. In the background of Lord of the Rings, the Rings of Power were only made because an elf unwittingly collaborated with Sauron! Galadriel is explicitly tempted to take the One Ring herself!
And I think the thing that really, really gets to me about people who just don’t get Tolkien is that they think Lord of the Rings exists in a sort of always magical world that’ll last forever, thanks to the efforts of our heroes. But it won’t; the Third Age is far from the days of power for the elven kingdoms. The dragons are dying out. Magic is leaving the world; it’s all in decline. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fight for the world, or for what’s right, but you must recognize that the glory days you long for won’t come back. They can’t. Aragorn being crowned is good for the people of Middle-Earth, but he can’t bring back the glory days of Numenor, because that’s impossible. And Tolkien, a scholar of history and mythology, who studied fallen civilizations and kingdoms that never got back to the power they once had, knew all of this.
[There’s a Tumblr post that compares Lord of the Rings to a post-apocalypse, which… isn’t too far from the truth, I think?]
So is it surprising that tech giants and political commentators don’t understand Lord of the Rings? No, not at all–a lot of people writing in the same genre as Tolkien didn’t understand his most famous work. Now, it’s a lot more disconcerting in this case because we’re talking about individuals who have a massive influence on society and politics, like the world’s richest man, but he’s following a trend that’s been happening for decades at this point: loving the superficial trappings of Tolkien’s work, but not absorbing a word of what he’s actually saying.
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